There is no
problem with the title of this talk. After
all, such a title has been thought of simply
because an area called the ‘Northeast’
exists in the country. But, to my mind,
there is a serious problem with the
bracketing of this region of nearly 40
million1 people, spread over eight2 states
that cover a vast 2,63,000 square kilometer
stretch, into what has come to be called the
‘Northeast.’3
By bracketing the eight northeastern Indian
states, with its diverse tribes, customs and
cultures, into what is called the
‘Northeast,’ we tend to ignore the distinct
identity and sub-national aspirations of
these ethnic groups. More so, such clubbing
together of the region, in an attempt to
look at it as a single entity, has led to
stereotyping of the problems that plague the
area. The fact that each state has a
different set of location-specific concerns
and grievances often gets blurred in the
scheme of things of policy framers and
government leaders who are supposed to
address these issues.
It is true that the region has as many as 30
armed insurgent organizations4 operating and
fighting the Indian State to push demands
ranging from secession to autonomy and right
to self determination. Besides, there are a
plethora of ethnic groups clamoring for
their rights and distinct identity, making
the region one of South Asia’s hottest
trouble spots. It is also true that
strategic alliances between rebel groups in
the region often transcend inter-state and
international borders. For instance, the
United Liberation Front of Asom’s (ULFA)
earlier links with the Isak-Muivah faction
of the National Socialist Council of
Nagaland (NSCN-IM) are well known.
Currently, the ULFA’s deadly 28th Battalion,
that has a crack bomb squad, operates out of
NSCN (Khaplang) bases in Myanmar and
Arunachal Pradesh. Again, the ULFA’s nexus
with the National Democratic Front of
Boroland (NDFB) and the Kamatapur Liberation
Organization (KLO) was established beyond
doubt with the busting of camps of these
three rebel groups in close proximity inside
Bhutan during the Bhutanese military assault
on the insurgents in December 2003.
Having said this, it must be borne in mind
that even these rebel alliances are only for
military reasons, for the basic purpose of
survival. The only commonality among or
between them is that all of them are
fighting the Indian State or symbols of the
Indian State to push ahead with their
respective agenda. But, none of them would
agree to fight for the liberation of the
‘Northeast’ in general. After all, their
main battle is for territorial supremacy
over areas they seek to represent. The
internecine battle between the Kukis and the
Nagas in Manipur in the nineties, aided by
insurgent groups representing both
communities, is a case in point.
The ULFA could have been an ally of the NSCN-IM
at one point of time, and has a strategic
tie-up with the NSCN-K now, but the group
did not take long to warn the NSCN-IM
against setting its eyes on Assam’s
territory. I have elaborated the
ULFA-NSCN-IM linkage vis-à-vis the latter’s
‘greater Nagaland’ demand slightly later in
this paper. But, there is no doubt that
there is a very big problem in bracketing
this region as something called the
‘Northeast’ and looking at it as one single
entity and prescribing solutions with such a
concept in mind.
If attempts to club the region together and
calling it the ‘Northeast’ is a problem,
there are many other problems in the area,
most of whom are the direct result of
governmental insensitivity, administrative
bungling or insensitivity of the Indian
mainstream. Let me list a few of the
problems or the trigger factors that have
led to the problems in the region before
attempting to talk on those at some length
later in this paper:
• Complete lack of understanding of the
psyche of the people of the region.
• Repeated, and even forceful attempts at
assimilation of the region and its people
with the so-called Indian ‘mainstream’
which, if anything, is absolutely alien to
most parts of the region, and, therefore,
considered by many in the region as not
worth being a part of.
• Realization that an integrationist policy
was not correct after all, has led the
government to concede autonomy demands of
ethnic groups, often leading to more such
demands and aspirations.
• The lack of an institutionalized response
mechanism with the Union Government to
address emerging situations and thereby
preventing their consolidation and
transformation into popular agitations.
• The tendency to ignore emerging movements
until the situation turns violent.
• The tendency to attach importance to
agitations, whether armed campaigns or
otherwise, by those groups which are more
powerful or more violent.
• Total marginalization of the state police
forces and increased dependence on the Army.
• Poor governance and lack of accountability
of the officials and the official machinery
engaged in ushering in development of the
region.
• Corruption and leakage of development
funds, directly impacting on the poor and
the needy. There are instances and
admissions by the Government of development
funds reaching the insurgents in the region.
5
• Inability of the government to make the
private sector open shop in the region in
any big way.
• The extremely dangerous fondness to hold
so-called peace talks with rebel groups,
irrespective of their strength, social
acceptance or relevance to local situations.
• Political instability of elected
governments as in Manipur and Arunachal
Pradesh.
• Ineffective border management, and
ineffective handling of the problem of
illegal migration from across India’s
borders.
• Insensitiveness of the media whose
coverage of the region is violence-driven.
This applies to the local, metropolitan or
the international media, both print as well
as electronic.
Understanding
Ethno-nationalism
‘We are Nagas by birth, Indians by
accident,’ or ‘We are Khasis by birth and
Indians by accident.’ Slogans such as these
are commonly heard in the region, reflecting
clearly the mindset of the people who
inhabits the area. We need to try and
understand the mindset of the people here
rather than seeking to dub them as being
largely anti-national or people with
dangerous sub-national aspirations. Yes, the
government leaders have come to realize that
the area and its people are distinct, and
have also suggested that their ‘mindset
needs to be changed.’ But, who is going to
change the mindset? That is the key question
as discussions to that effect in conference
rooms won’t do. I shall talk of this a
little later when I refer to the role of the
media in dealing or covering the region.
The region is an ethnic minefield, as it
comprises of around 160 Scheduled Tribes6,
besides an estimated 400 other tribal or
sub-tribal communities and groups.
Turbulence in the area, therefore, is not
caused just by armed separatist groups
representing different ethnic communities
fighting the central or the state
governments or their symbols to press for
either total independence or autonomy, but
also by the recurring battles for
territorial supremacy among the different
ethnic groups themselves. If the faction of
the Naga guerrilla group, the National
Socialist Council of Nagaland, headed by
Isak Chishi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah (NSCN-IM)
has been pushing ahead with its demand for
an independent Naga homeland to be carved
out of India, the Naga and the Kuki ethnic
groups in the state of Manipur, or the Bodo
and Santhal tribes people in western Assam,
have had a history of bitter conflict to
retain control of as much land as possible
and thereby preserve their identity and
rights.
What the Northeast of India is witness to
are essentially ethno-national movements by
these groups to further their sub-national
aspirations, often triggered by the fear of
losing their distinct identity. For
instance, the movement for maximum autonomy
by the Bodos, Assam’s largest plains tribal
community, has succeeded in the group
securing a new politico-administrative
structure within the existing State of Assam
following a memorandum of understanding (MoU)
with the Government of India on 10 February,
2003. The Bodo-majority areas have now come
under the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC),
a 40-member elective body that would run the
day-to-day administration of the areas under
it and undertake developmental projects to
improve the condition of the community and
the areas in which they inhabit with funds
allocated to it directly by the central
government, besides funding from the State
government7. The BTC, run, until now, by an
interim team of administrators, is gearing
up to hold its first elections. The BTC
Accord is seen as a fulfillment of the
sub-national aspirations of the Bodos of
Assam. Similarly, the six-year-long
antiforeigner uprising spearheaded by the
All Assam Students’ Union (AASU), the
State’s apex student group, from 1979 to
1985, had been a movement triggered off by
the fear within the indigenous Assamese
community of being overwhelmed by the
unabated influx of illegal Bangladeshi
migrants from across the porous border. The
anti-foreigner stir, among the biggest mass
uprising in India since the country’s
freedom struggle, ended with the signing of
an agreement, popularly called the Assam
Accord, between the central and state
governments and the AASU on 15 August, 1985.
The Accord fixed 25 March, 1971 (the day
Bangladesh was born) as the cut-off date for
detection and expulsion of the illegal
foreign migrants from the State of Assam.
The region has been caught in a vicious
cycle of lack of economic development and
opportunities causing unrest and militancy,
and then militancy and the resultant
violence retarding economic growth8. For
instance, the plan for industrial investment
in the region between August 1991 to
December 1994, under the post-liberalization
Indian economy, was a mere Rs 2,224 crore,
whereas in a single State like Maharashtra,
the figure, during the corresponding period,
stood at Rs 67,978 crore9. Under the
circumstances, it is natural to find the
people of the region harboring a great sense
of alienation from the Indian mainstream and
feel they are being neglected by this
distant mainstream. This has resulted in the
armed groups, as well as the unarmed ones,
representing the region’s various ethnic
groups and communities, often finding it
rather easy to push ahead with their
respective demands through either armed or
non-violent forms of movements. To say it
simply, these groups often have aggrieved
constituencies to bank on to pursue their
respective agenda. Another dimension to the
problem in the region is that underground
armed insurgent groups, overground
socio-political groupings representing
respective ethnic communities, and
influential students’ outfits whose members
are drawn from these communities often
strive to achieve the same goal, that of
protecting or pushing for the rights of the
communities whose interests they seek to
represent. Only the methods used are
different.
New Delhi appears to have been convinced
that an integrationist policy in holding the
Northeast together was after all not a
correct approach in view of the diverse
nature of the region’s demographic profile.
This may have halted it from performing its
role as a ‘homogenizing state’ any longer,
and instead recognizes the unique
differences and distinct identities of the
region’s ethnic groups and communities. It
seems that it is this realization that is
making the Indian Government concede demands
for autonomy time and again, giving in to
the aspirations of different ethnic groups
at different points of time. This, in turn,
has opened the Pandora’s Box with the
proliferation of movements to achieve
economic and political liberation on ethnic
lines, thereby leading to feuds between
ethnic groups within the region over
territorial supremacy.
Before the latest agreement between New
Delhi and the leaders of Assam’s Bodo ethnic
group on 10 February, 2003, another Bodo
Accord was signed in February 1993 that had
led to the creation of a Bodoland Autonomous
Council (BAC). The BAC was a non-starter as
the Government could not arrive at a
consensus in so far as the territorial
boundary of this Council was concerned. But,
the set of modalities that it put in place
to fix the Council’s boundary triggered off
a violent ethnic cleansing in western Assam.
Let us look at the inter-ethnic violence and
the trigger factor: In the summer of 1996,
the Bodos clashed with the Santhals, another
ethnic group that cohabited the area around
the principal district town of Kokrajhar,
250 kilometers west of Guwahati, Assam’s
capital. More than 300,000 people belonging
to both communities were displaced, and
around 250 people were killed in the ethnic
riots that began on 15 May, 1996 and
continued sporadically till the end of that
year10. As on February 2004, an estimated
130,000 people11 belonging to both
communities were still living subhuman lives
in so-called relief camps set up by the
Government, although 50,000 people have been
rehabilitated during the past one and half
years by the State administration. Although
a relative calm prevails in the area, the
divide between these two groups has been
widened beyond expectation.
Both communities, the Bodos and the Santhals,
had been living in peace in the area for
decades. But after the Bodo Accord of 1993,
the Government came up with a formula that
only those villages with a 50 per cent Bodo
population were to be included into the BAC.
This provision is generally believed to have
encouraged a section of Bodos, including
armed militant groups representing the
community, to attempt ethnic
cleansing—driving out the non-Bodos to
convert vast stretches into Bodo majority
areas and thereby get them included into the
Bodo Council and widen its territory12.
The radical elements within the Santhal
population responded by forming such rag-tag
armed groups with scary names as the Adivasi
Cobra Militants of Assam. The Cobra rebels
began by snatching arms from the police and
the paramilitary troopers, and have the
potential to transform themselves into a
more organized militant outfit. If that
happens, peace in Assam’s Bodo tribal
heartland, which is also home to the
Santhals, would remain a far cry13. The Kuki-Naga
riots that rocked the state of Manipur in
the mid-nineties, mainly during 1992-1993,
leading to the deaths of hundreds of
people14, is another clear example of
inter-ethnic battles in India’s Northeast
over territorial control. Both the Nagas and
the Kukis are fighting for separate
homelands and their territories overlap.
Members of the two groups have frequently
clashed in the past too for control of the
lucrative heroin trade route through Moreh,
an Indian outpost close to the border with
Myanmar.
The key factors that have prompted the Kuki-Naga
clashes include the desire of the Nagas,
particularly the rebels, to ease out the
Kukis who form a sizeable chunk of the
population in the four hill tribal-dominated
districts in Manipur that they have set
their eyes on. This also led to the
emergence or consolidation of the Kuki
insurgent groups that also resorted to
violent means to counter the Naga rebel
actions or to defend the community, often
located in remote hill-top hamlets. The
Nagas in Manipur, including the United Naga
Council, Manipur (UNCM), have been openly
seeking the merger of the Naga areas in
Manipur into the adjoining state of
Nagaland. The armed insurgent groups in the
region may be fighting the Indian state, but
when it comes to protecting their own
homeland cause, they don’t hesitate to lock
horns with other rebel groups or forces
within the region. For instance, the United
Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA)—Assam’s
frontline rebel group fighting for a
‘sovereign, Socialist Assam,’ since its
formation on 7 April, 1979—openly came out
against the NSCN-IM’s design to unify the
Naga-inhabited areas in the Northeast by
merging Naga dominated territories in states
like Assam with the state of Nagaland.
The ULFA, through the 17 July, 2001, issue
of its mouthpiece, Freedom, ridiculed the
idea of Nagalim or a ‘greater’ Naga homeland
and observed that ‘history should not be
distorted only to satisfy the chauvinistic
ego.’ Terming the decision to extend the
cease-fire ‘a suicidal act’, the ULFA
expressed hope that the ‘Naga leaders would
review their stand concerning their most
talked Nagalim over others territories15’.
This has, of course, been one of those rare
occasions when the ULFA chose to criticize
its former ally, and was obviously aimed at
playing to its Assamese constituent in the
state.
Funds & Governance:
Key Problems
Poor governance has been a major problem in
the region. This goes back to the first two
decades after India’s independence when the
national leaders were busy addressing the
broader economic concerns, giving shape to
the country’s foreign policy and grappling
with the nitty-gritty’s of administering the
nation. The northeastern region did not
figure high on New Delhi’s agenda during
this period except, perhaps, the realization
that this was a strategic area that needed
concentration of military strength. This led
to an impression that the Indian leadership
actually regarded the region as a buffer
against possible foreign aggression and
hardly anything else. What followed is well
known to us: the region got caught in the
vicious cycle of lack of development
breeding insurgency and unrest, and
militancy and violence retarding economic
growth.
By the mid-sixties, when militancy had come
to strike roots in the region and gave rise
to dangerous-looking insurgency movements
with separatist designs, the Union
Government started pumping money to the
states in the region, hoping that a
semblance of economic growth or development
could halt this trend. Today, despite the
lack of industrialization, the Net State
Domestic Product in the region is growing at
the rate of 11.2 per cent per annum at $4.2
billion, indicating a high purchasing power
of the people in the area compared to those
in the rest of the country. But, insurgency
continues, and has in fact multiplied and
assumed dangerous proportions, with
trans-border linkages, making them flush
with funds and military hardware.
I would like to list two main reasons why
pumping of funds into the region by the
Centre has not had the desired impact:
• Leakage of
funds at various levels of the government
machinery. Development funds making their
way into the coffers of the insurgent groups
are common knowledge16.
• Lack of capacity by the states in the
region to absorb the huge quantity of funds
in the absence of training and expertise to
successfully come up with implementable
location-specific projects and the
infrastructure to get some of these projects
off the drawing board stage.
Prime Minister Deve Gowda in 1996 appeared
to have been convinced that development
efforts and counter-insurgency measures must
go hand-in-hand in the region. He seemed to
have realized that the government simply
could not wait for an insurgency to end or
the situation to improve before launching
serious development and economic
regeneration drives. Prime Minister Gowda
toured the region for six days at a stretch
and in October 1996 came up with a Rs 6,100
crore exclusive economic package for the
region. His successor I.K.Gujral increased
this amount to more than Rs 7,000 crore and
then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in
January 2000 announced a Rs 10,000 crore
special package for the region. Once again
the familiar problem of the package being
left largely unimplemented has come to
neutralize its intended impact. This was
because of poor monitoring, lack of
accountability and non-adherence to the set
time frame for project execution.
Sample this as an example of governmental
admission to misappropriation or diversion
of development funds and poor monitoring: On
October 26, 2004, DONER Minister P.R.Kyndiah
announced a ‘special economic package’ of Rs
240 crore to the troubled State of Manipur.
The package is meant for projects especially
in the fields of education, health, power,
transport and communication. Announcing the
package—sourced from the non-lapsable pool
of central resources—DONER Minister Kyndiah
said utilization of the funds would be
‘strictly monitored.’ He added: “We are
aware that funds sanctioned earlier for
various projects have been siphoned out or
diverted. We have reminded the Chief
Minister to prevent such anomalies. There
could be a significant impact on the State’s
fortunes if our guidelines are adhered
to…17” Another fact that needs to be taken
into account is that the continuity of the
programs gets snapped with the change in
governments at the Centre and in the states
concerned. The tragedy in so far as the
region is concerned is that New Delhi
changes its policy to this area with the
change of governments and political parties
heading the government.
Less than ten years ago, then Prime Minister
Deve Gowda set up a high-level committee to
list the requirements for infrastructure
development in the region. The Committee
went on to recommend earmarking of a
whopping Rs 28,000 crore for the region to
have the basic infrastructure in place for
possible industrial investments18. The
projection on that occasion may have shown a
huge gap, but the fact remains that funds
have been flowing in rather liberally to the
region. An analyst writes: “The Department
of North Eastern Region (DONER) has an
annual budget of Rs.550 crores. The North
Eastern Council (NEC)—the region’s apex
development funding agency—has another
Rs.500 crores earmarked for the region. This
amount in totality is a small part of the
enormous amount of funding available to the
States through different central schemes,
one-time packages announced by successive
Prime Ministers, ‘Peace Packages’ provided
to States like Nagaland and Mizoram etc,
grants by international development agencies
like the World Bank, and the Asian
Development Bank (ADB), which recently (in
2003) approved a master project for the
Northeast of Rs.2,000 crores.19”
End Notes:
1
Census of India, 2001
2 The state of Sikkim has recently been
formally bracketed under ‘Northeast’ after
it has been included into the North Eastern
Council (NEC), the region’s apex funding and
development agency. The other seven states
of the Northeast are: Assam, Meghalaya,
Nagaland, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh,
Manipur and Tripura.
3 Located at: Longitude 89.46 degree E to
97.30 degree E and Latitude 21.57 degree N
to 29.30 degree N.
4 The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs’
Annual Report for 2002-2003 has listed 24
active insurgent groups in the northeastern
states (there are several dormant ones). In
its chapter titled ‘Security Scenario in the
North East, the report (Sl No 3.104) states:
The most serious militant affected
states/areas viz, the whole of Manipur,
Nagaland and Assam, Tirap and Changlang
districts of Arunachal Pradesh and a 20 km
belt in the states having common border with
Assam have been declared as ‘disturbed
areas’ under the Armed Forces (Special
Powers) Act, 1958 as amended in 1972. (The
Armed Forces Act gives sweeping powers to
the security forces to the extent of
shooting to kill a suspected insurgent).
5 In June 2003, Union Minister for the
Department of North Eastern Region (DONER)
C.P.Thakur maintained that almost 10 per
cent of the funds meant for the development
of the NE region are going to the coffers of
the militants, ‘in most of the schemes.’ See
Bibhu Prasad Routray, ‘Neglected Northeast:
Whose Responsibility?’, Institute for Peace
and Conflict Studies, New Delhi
<http://ipcs.org/North_east_articles2.jsp?action=showView&kValue=1154&status=article&mod=a
6 Those tribes or tribal communities that
are recognized under Article 342 of the
Indian Constitution.
7 The Memorandum of Understanding on the BTC,
signed on Feb 10, 2003 reads: ‘In order to
accelerate the development of the region and
to meet the aspirations of the people, the
Government of India will provide
financial assistance of Rs 100 crores per
annum for 5 years for projects to develop
the socio-economic infrastructure in BTC
areas over and above the normal plan
assistance to the State of Assam’.
For the full text of the MoU see South Asia
Terrorism Portal,
http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/assam/documents/papers/memorandum_feb02.htm
(Accessed on 16 February 2004).
8 For specific indicators demonstrating the
economic under-development of India’s
Northeast, see Wasbir Hussain, ‘Contemporary
North-East India: Problems and Prospects,’
in J P Singh (eds), Trends in Social
Sciences and Humanities in North East India
(1947-97), (New Delhi: Regency Publications,
1998), pp.129-136.
9 Ibid..
10 Wasbir Hussain, ‘Our Land, Our Refugees’,
The Hindu, 26 May, 2000.
11 Dr. A K Bhutani, Deputy Commissioner,
Kokrajhar, Interview with the Author, 26
February, 2004.
12 Ibid..
13 Wasbir Hussain, ‘Meeting the Challenges
of Insurgency in NE: The Centre’s
Responsibility’, Paper presented at a
national seminar on ‘Terrorism: An Unending
Malaise’, at New Delhi, March 2-3, 2000
organized by the Indian Council of Social
Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi, held at
India International Centre in New Delhi.
14 According to an estimate 750 Kukis lost
their lives and a total of 1,14,300 others
belonging to both Naga and Kuki communities
have been displaced during the conflict.
Bhagat Oinam, ‘Patterns of Ethnic Conflicts
in the Northeast: A Study on Manipur’,
Imphal Free Press, 26 June, 2003.
15 Bibhu Prasad Routray, ‘Naga-Cease-Fire
Extension: Clash of Imagined Homelands’,
Website of the Institute of Peace and
Conflict Studies, http://www.ipcs.org/ipcs/issueIndex2.jsp?action=showView&kValue=812&issue=1014&status=article&mod=b
(Accessed on January 27, 2004)
16 See Wasbir Hussain, ‘A Protest Hijacked’,
Outlook, August 30, 2004, p-33 for an idea
of the annual budget of some of the
insurgent groups in Manipur, for instance.
According to intelligence estimates, the
yearly budget of the United National
Liberation Front (UNLF) is Rs 9 crore, PLA
Rs 9 crore, People’s Revolutionary Party of
Kangleipak (PREPAK) Rs 6 crore, NSCN-IM Rs 9
crore, NSCN-K Rs 8 crore, Kanglei Yawol
Kanna Lup (KYKL) Rs 6 crore and the Kuki
National Army (KNA) Rs 4 crore.
17 The Telegraph, Calcutta, ‘Money balm for
Manipur,’ October 27, 2004.The Telegraph,
Calcutta, ‘Money balm for Manipur,’ October
27, 2004.
18 Wasbir Hussain, ‘Contemporary North-East
India: Problems and Prospects,’ in J P Singh
(eds), Trends in Social Sciences and
Humanities in North East India (1947-97),
(New Delhi: Regency Publications, 1998),
pp.128-129
19 Bibhu Prasad Routray, ‘Neglected
Northeast: Whose Responsibility?’, Institute
for Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi
<http://ipcs.org/North_east_articles2.jspa?ction=showView&kValue=1154&status=article&mod=a
*** Wasbir Hussain is a journalist and
commentator based in Guwahati, India, and
Director Centre for Development & Peace
Studies, Guwahati, India. He is also
Associate Fellow, Institute for Conflict
Management, New Delhi. He has been covering
insurgency, ethnic strife, and other major
political and social developments in the
seven north eastern Indian states for the
past 20 years. Before his present
assignment, Hussain was Consulting Editor,
The Newspaper Today, INDIA TODAY GROUP
ONLINE, Editor, The Northeast Daily,
Guwahati, Special Correspondent with The
Asian Age; Regional Editor of The Telegraph;
and Special Correspondent of The Telegraph.
He bagged the 1996 Sanskriti Foundation
National Award for excellence in journalism,
from Sanskriti Pratisthan, New Delhi.
*** The paper was presented as part of the
"Interaction on the North East" Observer
Research Foundation, New Delhi Nov.18, 2004
to be continued....... |
